ABSTRACT
'Un realista tra virgolette', a realist in inverted commas: this self-portrait of the writer best introduces the metamorphosis of Tabucchi's fiction, a world in limine, seen from a displaced perspective, in the boundary region of inverted commas. As fiction and fantasy are necessary to experience reality, dream and hallucination become the only means of reaching one's identity, soul and Unconscious. Besides the rewritings of travel literature and the detective in the short novels of the 1980s, other stories published by Sellerio in the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s similarly build on textual metamorphosis. Literature is the place where opposites come together in perpetual metamorphoses - 'literary' and 'material' culture, poetry and gastronomy, the real and the fantastic. And Requiem is one of the most ironic and lucid critiques on the contemporary state of the arts, as well as a picture of a society in transition.
